Ultimate shopping with O'Brien

I was introduced, one might say, to ShopWiki today by a passing email. Don't know that I'd ever heard of it, or rather, if I had, it was only very much in passing.
It's rather like a version of Google that focuses only on shopping (Yes, really! Did you think it might be otherwise?), the main difference being that it will only bring up retail items rather than the endless possibilities that Google enhances our world with whenever we go searching...! Apparently it also finds all items in the search range, rather than just ones that have paid to be seen. Interesting idea.
I don't know how obscure you can go, but I checked out Flann O'Brien (see the last post) and he came up without any difficulty. However, a difficulty that did arise when I tried that was that it kept on wiping out this page I'm working on at the moment. Fortunately Blogger saves stuff readily, so I didn't lose anything. But I can't see quite why there's a link between Blogger and ShopWiki. Odd.
You can specify how small or large a price range you want, sort from low to high or in reverse, and each item that comes up has enough information to show you whether it's worth pursuing or not. Curiously, if you checked out the lowest price on the strollers (in the first link above), you'll find a couple - at least at the moment - priced at 0.1c each. Unfortunately, when you click on that particular item you receive a message: This item cannot be ordered on the Web. You have to ring a number to find out more. Still, you can't have everything, obviously!
And doesn't that stroller in the picture remind you a bit of a lawn mower? I'm not sure what the visual link is.
Incidentally, I began reading some of Flann O'Brien's stuff yesterday. Found a collection of his Irish Times columns in the library - he takes a crazy idea and runs with it. Regrettably you have to read the book to see how funny he is, but one thing struck me that I want to record.
One of my (favourite) sayings when my children were growing up was: Talk to the wall, Michael, talk to the wall. My younger son delights in reminding me of this at every opportunity.
O'Brien writes (pg 39 of The Best of Myles) I might as well be talking to the wall, of course, though this phrase has always seemed strange in view of the belief that walls have ears.
I think only O'Brien (or possibly Chesterton) would have come up with something as quirky as that.

The price is right!

I’ve mentioned before how we used to sell books on the Net when I ran the bookshop, and how we never quite found the ideal software setup for making direct sales available to people via the Net. Everything had to be handled by email: the customer’s initial inquiry, the acceptance by us of the purchase, the information about when the book would be sent out, and how it would be paid for, and so on.

This was fine in one sense, in that it meant we had real contact with the customers, and they knew they were dealing with a real person. For many people that’s preferable to dealing with machinery on the Net. But equally, if we’d been expanding, we would have needed to make sales via some sort of shopping cart software, and that would have meant finding a system that was economic, would accept major credit cards online, had tech support, had a design that fitted in with our ‘look,’ and that was user-friendly. Rather like the company that’s provided me with this nice big logo!

I always look at the price of things before I look at the features. If the price isn’t right for me, nothing else much matters. In this instance, this product would have suited us down to the ground, as the price for the most basic level is still very good. Or to put it another way, what you get for the basic price is most of the software.

Scary Moment

Crikey, there was a scary moment! After I'd done my demo shopping I came back to my email program to find three emails: two thanking me for registering with the demo shops, and one giving me the details of my order! Gulp. The order, which I now see was for $2,900AU, is all laid out in detail in the email and I can even click on the status of my order to see how it's progressing. The only good thing is that I haven't given them any details as to how I'd like to pay. I feel like skulking under the bed until it all goes away....

Doing some demo shopping.

I know I’m always talking about the shop I used to manage, but you’ll just have to get used to it. It was a big part of my life for seventeen years, which equates to number of years it took me to grow up – and that was a pretty important time too!
We used to have a program called Chreos for our data base and debtors and creditors and POS. (Point of sale to those who aren’t familiar with the abbreviation.) It was a good program and overall had few areas I’d complain about. By the time we started using it, it had been well and truly tested by other shops in the same business as us, and a lot of things had been ironed out.
However, at that time it wasn’t usable for direct online selling, and this was something we looked at fairly seriously a couple of times. It would have meant quite a change to the way we processed our data, but it would have been worth it.
I’ve just been playing with some shopping cart software which does all the things I’d like to have done in the shop. Ashop.com.au has some demo models online and I’ve just ordered myself a couple of scooters, some helmets of various sizes (you never know, my head might grow or shrink) and some roller blades. Bill came to something like $2,000AU, but that was okay, because at the end of your playing you were reminded that this was just a demo – and not to call to make your order!
It was easy to register as a customer (almost as easy as sending the items to your shopping cart by merely clicking on them), and though there’s a spelling error on the address info page (‘biling’ instead of ‘billing’) I was happy to overlook that because of the ease of usage. You’re even offered the chance to pay by PayPal, which isn’t something you find everywhere. The demo is so lifelike it even took me as far as asking for my PayPal address, by which time I thought it was wise to get out of there, just in case the program had decided to stop playing demo and get into the real thing.
For some reason I couldn’t access the Admin demos using Firefox, but that’s okay. When I get a minute I’ll give it a try on IE7.
Did I mention the price? That looked very enticing to me. For a small business, it's around $99 per month. Pretty good value, I'd say.